Søren Kierkegaard, the political philosopher?

Abstract

In my study, I would like to present a possible political philosophical reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy, based on the international literature in this direction. However, the study seeks to go beyond a simple literature review, I will examine the emerging political aspects along three key concepts. These are the Kierkegaardian concepts of self, despair, and conscience. After reviewing these concepts and analysing them from the point of view of political philosophy, I reconstruct the elements of Kierkegaard’s theory that have political relevance. From the unfolding of the concepts, we find that Kierkegaard takes a kind of liberal-conservative position, whose central element is the responsible individual, whose self-creation creates real communities in the socio-political life. He defined modern politics as a form of despair, from which, on an individual level, the phenomenon of conscience may be the way out. Furthermore, since in Kierkegaard the concept of self is a combination of religious and political goals and the ontological status of the self and politics falls under a common spiritual category, Kierkegaard’s “political” philosophy may also be suitable for reconciling the concepts of citoyen and bourgeois.